Was quite interesting, especially the fact that house numbers were invented multiple times for different reasons and with different systems.
It got quite repetitive though, and I quit after roughly half of the read, when the even/odd number system was explained for the third time. Seems to be written with heavy AI assistance.
The entire site is very obviously AI generated. The fonts, layout, and even the logo are obviously AI. I'm not sure about the content. Maybe the "author" is actually someone really interested in history and just used Claude to generate a frontend for their blog, but I couldn't bring myself to read much of it. Maybe it's just me, but the "AI feel" makes me not want to read sites like this. Feels like a waste of time to read a bunch of (potentially) AI slop that might not even be accurate. I'd be better off just asking Claude why addresses have numbers
I got curious because of the comments and wow. Just how many fonts were hurt creating this page?! If you are an ‘independent publisher’ that would be sorta priority? I guess not in ‘the age of ai’
It’s also very over-designed; there are multiple different styles for headings, subheadings, pull quotes, section headings, etc etc. All with their own colors, font faces, font sizes, etc.
yeah I m a solo publisher, so I do use AI as an assistant to help with editing, formatting, HTML, and other production work that normally be handled by a team. The historical research, fact-checking, source verification, and overall direction are my own, but I rely on AI to speed up the publishing process.
I also take your point about the repetition. That's something I revisit and tighten up, because readability matters more than word count.
but, when I write for external publications, the style is much more traditional because I follow each publication editorial guidelines. On my own site, I experiment more with layout and presentation, which can sometimes make the pages feel different. but it look cool
If you are curious, here are a few examples of my work published elsewhere:
> because readability matters more than word count.
“If I had more time, I would’ve written a shorter letter.”
If part of the reason you need LLMs to speed up the process is because you were trying to hit a word count and the typing was taking too long, it’s actively working against you!
I live in Barcelona, and I dislike their house numbering system. In Buenos Aires, things are much more rational: one block is 100m.
So the first house may have a number somewhere between 0 and 20, depending on how far the entrance is from the corner. The last house number on that block will be below 100.
On the next block, the first house will be numbered somewhere between 100 and 110-120, depending on how many meters the entrance is from the second corner.
This system is amazing. Without much mental effort, you can understand how many blocks you need to walk to reach house 340 if you are starting from the first block.
In Barcelona, you can walk 400m and still see only four house numbers. It doesn't make sense at all. In addition, one side can be odds and the other even, but sometimes you have one side going 5, 10, 12, 22, and the other side of the street 453, 421, 411. There is no order.
They also use things like 26A, 26B, and 26C because each house cannot have its own number. And they also use ranges. My house, for example, is not Streetname 26. It's Streetname 26-28. Bonkers.
In a similar fashion, I have slowly won my other half over to numbering highway exits by distance (e.g., the exit at mile¹ 5 is exit 5; if the next isn't until mile 8, then it's exit 8, and there just aren't exits 6 & 7), vs. sequentially (the exit after exit 5 is exit 6 — usually! — without regards to distance; exit 6 might be 8 miles from exit 5).
The benefit of the mile-marker system is that given an exit, you know roughly how long in both time and space until that exit as a driver. The other system is just chaos, and it usually doesn't end up sequential anyways. They're not renumbering the whole road to add an exit, so you get exits 5A, 5B, 6 anyways.
¹we're in for a world of hurt if we ever get on board with metric…
It makes totally sense. Here in Barcelona, an exit goes by one number "Exit 26", it can be 10km, 15km, etc. They tell you the proximity: "Exit 26B 1000m", "Exit 26B 500m" and the last warning the cartels are white "Exit 26B 250m".
I still remember when Interstate exits in the US were numbered sequentially. It seems like only 20 years ago they switched to mile markers for exit numbers.
If this is interesting to folks, there's an entire book on this sort of phenomenon, "Seeing like a State" (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/20186.Seeing_Like_a_S...). It talks about why land parcels are squares (instead of strip farming, where fertile land was shared by many families), how we arrived at current measurement units and not "a basketful of grapes", standardization of monetary units, and a ton more. Excellent book.
My house has a name, not a number, not that uncommon in the UK, especially for a 200-year-old building.
I think there’s a bit of false equivalence going on here as well regarding zip codes (several thousand addresses, or thereabouts) and a UK postcode (maybe 10-15 houses).
You could genuinely address a letter to me using something like:
4, L226ET
That’s all it would take. No, that’s not my address, characters within changed to protect the guilty, but my address could look just like that.
I was going to point out the same thing. At least in the UK, it's a bit of an urban vs rural, or maybe urban vs village, divide. Small communities can rely on names; larger polities need numbers. This was pointed out in TFA, but not that the practice continues in, well, practice right down to the present day.
Anecdote: my then-partner and I very nearly bought a terraced house in a small-ish UK town. It had a number, but no name, and we fantasized about giving it one, and arrived at one that would have been perfect for the property. I'm sad that purchase fell through, for the practical reason that we were looking immediately after the financial crisis, so it would have been an incredible investment, but also because the house will never be called by what felt like an almost pre-destined moniker. Instead, we moved into a (rental) property that had born the same name since (at least) the late-17th century. History is thick in some parts of the world.
And, yes: UK postcodes are marvelous. They almost make the rest of the address superfluous. Are they the most rational day-to-day "object" that country has ever developed? I can't think of anything else that might match them.
Am in Canada where postal codes are somewhat street name-dependent even when that doesn't strictly make sense. Through a quirk of history, my corner house's address is on the otherwise vacant side street instead of on the main thoroughfare... the result being a unique postal code for our house, and 3 letters and 3 numbers would likely deliver mail to my house with no other information at all. I haven't tried it yet but I want to, just to see.
US Zip+4 (the "long" zip code) is quite specific. I've never tried to address a letter using only e.g. addressee name and zip code but it would probably work.
Closest thing I can think of are my tax returns which I address something like:
IRS
KANSAS CITY, MO xxxxx
Some older US house numbers are just sequential (or incrementing) along a road but many are based on some "origin" point and increase by e.g. 100 for each standard city block. Usually even numbers on one side of the street and odd on the other. But there is no dependably consistent scheme from town to town AFAIK.
By all means, the variety in addressing is a constant software-developer trap. The above will cover the 99% case though. There are even buildings with multiple postcodes (DVLA is one such, I believe)
So that allows developers to create systems where I can't get the local council to deal with a problem? Of course the developers who wrote the council tax system understood that it was aren't crap like those who deliver the 99% solution – they had my address and the other number 1 as separate.
Or post does not get delivered as it is addressed wrongly?
In Ireland, it isn't only rural addresses which have no house numbers. Plenty of houses even in towns had non-unique addresses before the introduction of eircodes. On my road, all the original houses (each standing on an acre plot) have numbers, but all the infill ones don't. You'd think the house built on the corner of 502's land might get 502A, but no. When my parents bought this house, the address was the same as many many others on the same road. They gave the house a name, so it would have a unique address, though the previous residents had managed fine for twenty years without one.
I had friends who rented around the corner. They had to give their address as "care of" the landlord's name, though the landlord didn't live there. That's because An Post knew his name, but wouldn't know the names of tenants.
Have Eircodes improved the situation? I know they’re supposed to provide a postcode unique to a specific address, but I’m not clear on how thoroughly they’ve been implemented.
The southeastern Wisconsin system takes the address idea further, the address grid is tied back to the Milwaukee grid. A local official gives the example W156 N8480: roughly 156 streets west of the origin and 84 blocks north. He specifically notes that you can use the address to determine whether you need to travel north, south, east, or west. Wisconsin's statewide NG9-1-1 standards even explicitly recognize these two-direction grid addresses, giving W180N8085 as an example.
That is, in a navigational sense, superior to ordinary street addressing.
Take something like N90 W17567. Once you understand the system, you already know approximately where the destination is: the road lies about 90 blocks north of the baseline, while the property is about 175.67 blocks west of the north-south baseline. The address is essentially a human-readable coordinate pair.
In other words, if someone gives you an address like N90 W17567, and you understand the grid, you immediately know roughly how far north and west the property is without having to look up the street or pull out a map.
So every city you travel to you need to look up the baseline location? I'd rather houses and streets have numbers so I can determine how to get there just by looking at street signs.
When discussing systems like the sequential vs the grid, the article misses one other important type of addressing: the metric system (used in most cities of Brazil for example). In this system the number are roughly the distance (in meters) from the beginning of the street (of course following the even/odd sides rule). This results in "messier" numbers than the grid system, numbers that don't match the hundreds to the block number, but it perfectly codify distances even in the presence of blocks of different sizes on different cities or neighborhoods. Also it works perfectly without blocks at all, a long road without any crossings can follow the same pattern, and when a city grows onto new lands and new blocks are carved by the side of those roads, the same old numbers continue working unchanged (this pattern can be seen clearly when old radial roads slowly turn into radial avenues as the city grows).
Napoleon...the answer to this is Napoleon. Also, the odd vs even number thing comes from him too. Pretty weird that the page doesn't mention him at all.
A kot of things got regularized for E911 over time in the US. In my lifetime, I remember not having a street address--only a rural delivery route. (I think a PO Box got added at one one point though we didn't actually have or use the box.) And a cabin we would rent out from time to time didn't have an address either even as an adult. There were a lot of oddities around; roads with continuous numbering schemes where you couldn't actually drive from one end of the road to another.
Unrelated, Japan (shocker) has a totally different system, at least they used to.
Japan has buildings addressed by block rather than by street (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system), which is a legacy inherited from older systems and can be a nightmare for finding places (web searches will find you plenty of complaints from native residents about the system and its issues, like a lack of any consistent ordering). I suppose it does have the advantage that streets can be changed, interrupted, etc, without affecting the expected addresses at all.
With online maps and GPS, I find it less notable these days but I remember it being a bit of a nightmare the first once or twice when I was there even though I was aware going in.
When Australia decided every address should have a number (early 60s I guess) my grandmother simply refused to comply. She continued to use the name of the house in all correspondence (including the gas company, milkman, voting, whatever) until she finally moved out of her house around 1998 when she was also in her 90s.
Fun one: Costa Rican addresses are still often relative to a landmark. I used to have a subcontractor there, and his address was something like "500m north of the old church" (which IIRC wasn't even there anymore). It was kinda hard to figure out how to get this into the DHL website, but it always made it there.
I learned about this when standing at the customs counter in San Jose at two in the morning. I had an address for an AirBnB but the address as given didn't come up in google maps, or the system used by customs. They wanted to know where we were staying, and it was a bit of a sticking point. Eventually we were able to whatsapp the host and got a different way of addressing it that worked. Quite a memorable encounter.
I remember in San José and maybe other Costa Rican cities with a street number system where even/odd were used for the cardinal directions. Calles (streets) run N/S, Avenidas (avenues) run E/W, and odd is east or north. So Calle 8 Avenida 7 is in the northwest. I also remember finding it helpful in theory but not very helpful in practice since the rest of the addressing wasn't normalized. I also recall more than one Latin American city where they ran the numbers up one-by-one, and this didn't scale over the decades or centuries, so they renumbered... just meaning that every house had two numbers, and people used both.
If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy the book _When Information Came of Age_ by Headrick. The chapters on maps and postal systems in particular have some overlap with this article.
House numbering is surprisingly interesting and diverse! Europe does it differently from the Americas, but Colombia has its own method, and so does Germany. (Infuriatingly, you can find both German and European house numbering in Berlin.) Some cities assign two numbers to a building on a street corner, one number for each street; some don't. Then again, some places like Brasília or Naberezhnye Chelny don't use streets as the "scope" for house numbers at all, and adopt numeration by neighborhood that looks like it's intended for robots not humans -- I used to go to a bar in Brasília whose address was CLS 409 bloco A. And some countries don't care for house numbers at all, like Bosnia and Herzegovina.
I have a feeling that someone has to have a special interest in all that. Hell, maybe I should write a blog post.
Here in California, we have Carmel-By-The-Sea, which has had no street addresses for more than 100 years. The town is finally implementing them after endless resistance entirely because the basically static population has finally aged out enough that people's medical supply deliveries and the like can't get to the right houses.
On a side note, boy, this page is a nightmare of low-contrast design and ads everywhere on top of that.
Another page that gets "cute" with javascript and in turn is unreadable because of it. (not technically unreadable, but waiting for the test to appear gets in the way to reading to the point where it isn't worth your time).
Don't like the readability of the page.
Was quite interesting, especially the fact that house numbers were invented multiple times for different reasons and with different systems.
It got quite repetitive though, and I quit after roughly half of the read, when the even/odd number system was explained for the third time. Seems to be written with heavy AI assistance.
The text is AI. The web design also screams AI.
Pangram says "100% of this text is AI"
https://www.pangram.com/history/cec57c46-3a51-4d60-9ba1-3914...
The entire site is very obviously AI generated. The fonts, layout, and even the logo are obviously AI. I'm not sure about the content. Maybe the "author" is actually someone really interested in history and just used Claude to generate a frontend for their blog, but I couldn't bring myself to read much of it. Maybe it's just me, but the "AI feel" makes me not want to read sites like this. Feels like a waste of time to read a bunch of (potentially) AI slop that might not even be accurate. I'd be better off just asking Claude why addresses have numbers
I got curious because of the comments and wow. Just how many fonts were hurt creating this page?! If you are an ‘independent publisher’ that would be sorta priority? I guess not in ‘the age of ai’
It’s also very over-designed; there are multiple different styles for headings, subheadings, pull quotes, section headings, etc etc. All with their own colors, font faces, font sizes, etc.
And it’s all too bloody dark!
yeah I m a solo publisher, so I do use AI as an assistant to help with editing, formatting, HTML, and other production work that normally be handled by a team. The historical research, fact-checking, source verification, and overall direction are my own, but I rely on AI to speed up the publishing process.
I also take your point about the repetition. That's something I revisit and tighten up, because readability matters more than word count.
but, when I write for external publications, the style is much more traditional because I follow each publication editorial guidelines. On my own site, I experiment more with layout and presentation, which can sometimes make the pages feel different. but it look cool
If you are curious, here are a few examples of my work published elsewhere:
• Medievalists.net: https://www.medievalists.net/2026/06/bell-tower-medieval/
• Family Handyman: https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/history-of-toll-roads...
• Bored Panda: https://www.boredpanda.com/rarest-most-expensive-historical-...
> because readability matters more than word count.
“If I had more time, I would’ve written a shorter letter.”
If part of the reason you need LLMs to speed up the process is because you were trying to hit a word count and the typing was taking too long, it’s actively working against you!
I live in Barcelona, and I dislike their house numbering system. In Buenos Aires, things are much more rational: one block is 100m.
So the first house may have a number somewhere between 0 and 20, depending on how far the entrance is from the corner. The last house number on that block will be below 100.
On the next block, the first house will be numbered somewhere between 100 and 110-120, depending on how many meters the entrance is from the second corner.
This system is amazing. Without much mental effort, you can understand how many blocks you need to walk to reach house 340 if you are starting from the first block.
In Barcelona, you can walk 400m and still see only four house numbers. It doesn't make sense at all. In addition, one side can be odds and the other even, but sometimes you have one side going 5, 10, 12, 22, and the other side of the street 453, 421, 411. There is no order.
They also use things like 26A, 26B, and 26C because each house cannot have its own number. And they also use ranges. My house, for example, is not Streetname 26. It's Streetname 26-28. Bonkers.
In a similar fashion, I have slowly won my other half over to numbering highway exits by distance (e.g., the exit at mile¹ 5 is exit 5; if the next isn't until mile 8, then it's exit 8, and there just aren't exits 6 & 7), vs. sequentially (the exit after exit 5 is exit 6 — usually! — without regards to distance; exit 6 might be 8 miles from exit 5).
The benefit of the mile-marker system is that given an exit, you know roughly how long in both time and space until that exit as a driver. The other system is just chaos, and it usually doesn't end up sequential anyways. They're not renumbering the whole road to add an exit, so you get exits 5A, 5B, 6 anyways.
¹we're in for a world of hurt if we ever get on board with metric…
It makes totally sense. Here in Barcelona, an exit goes by one number "Exit 26", it can be 10km, 15km, etc. They tell you the proximity: "Exit 26B 1000m", "Exit 26B 500m" and the last warning the cartels are white "Exit 26B 250m".
I still remember when Interstate exits in the US were numbered sequentially. It seems like only 20 years ago they switched to mile markers for exit numbers.
Many still have "old exit XX" alongside the current exit number.
If this is interesting to folks, there's an entire book on this sort of phenomenon, "Seeing like a State" (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/20186.Seeing_Like_a_S...). It talks about why land parcels are squares (instead of strip farming, where fertile land was shared by many families), how we arrived at current measurement units and not "a basketful of grapes", standardization of monetary units, and a ton more. Excellent book.
My house has a name, not a number, not that uncommon in the UK, especially for a 200-year-old building.
I think there’s a bit of false equivalence going on here as well regarding zip codes (several thousand addresses, or thereabouts) and a UK postcode (maybe 10-15 houses).
You could genuinely address a letter to me using something like:
4, L226ET
That’s all it would take. No, that’s not my address, characters within changed to protect the guilty, but my address could look just like that.
I was going to point out the same thing. At least in the UK, it's a bit of an urban vs rural, or maybe urban vs village, divide. Small communities can rely on names; larger polities need numbers. This was pointed out in TFA, but not that the practice continues in, well, practice right down to the present day.
Anecdote: my then-partner and I very nearly bought a terraced house in a small-ish UK town. It had a number, but no name, and we fantasized about giving it one, and arrived at one that would have been perfect for the property. I'm sad that purchase fell through, for the practical reason that we were looking immediately after the financial crisis, so it would have been an incredible investment, but also because the house will never be called by what felt like an almost pre-destined moniker. Instead, we moved into a (rental) property that had born the same name since (at least) the late-17th century. History is thick in some parts of the world.
And, yes: UK postcodes are marvelous. They almost make the rest of the address superfluous. Are they the most rational day-to-day "object" that country has ever developed? I can't think of anything else that might match them.
Am in Canada where postal codes are somewhat street name-dependent even when that doesn't strictly make sense. Through a quirk of history, my corner house's address is on the otherwise vacant side street instead of on the main thoroughfare... the result being a unique postal code for our house, and 3 letters and 3 numbers would likely deliver mail to my house with no other information at all. I haven't tried it yet but I want to, just to see.
US Zip+4 (the "long" zip code) is quite specific. I've never tried to address a letter using only e.g. addressee name and zip code but it would probably work.
Closest thing I can think of are my tax returns which I address something like:
Some older US house numbers are just sequential (or incrementing) along a road but many are based on some "origin" point and increase by e.g. 100 for each standard city block. Usually even numbers on one side of the street and odd on the other. But there is no dependably consistent scheme from town to town AFAIK.L226ET looks like a literal geohash
A lot of GIS computer systems and apps like Uber use these to locate person/building
4, L22 6ET doesn't work very fast/reliably in practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ss7A20EVpk
Yes but you could not address a couple of places I have lived in in England like that.
First was a house in a small cul de sac – with no number just a name. Second was a flat – there are two number 1s in the same post code.
By all means, the variety in addressing is a constant software-developer trap. The above will cover the 99% case though. There are even buildings with multiple postcodes (DVLA is one such, I believe)
So that allows developers to create systems where I can't get the local council to deal with a problem? Of course the developers who wrote the council tax system understood that it was aren't crap like those who deliver the 99% solution – they had my address and the other number 1 as separate.
Or post does not get delivered as it is addressed wrongly?
My house has no less than 6 numbers. Everything is a number here. Until it isnt
In Ireland, it isn't only rural addresses which have no house numbers. Plenty of houses even in towns had non-unique addresses before the introduction of eircodes. On my road, all the original houses (each standing on an acre plot) have numbers, but all the infill ones don't. You'd think the house built on the corner of 502's land might get 502A, but no. When my parents bought this house, the address was the same as many many others on the same road. They gave the house a name, so it would have a unique address, though the previous residents had managed fine for twenty years without one.
I had friends who rented around the corner. They had to give their address as "care of" the landlord's name, though the landlord didn't live there. That's because An Post knew his name, but wouldn't know the names of tenants.
Have Eircodes improved the situation? I know they’re supposed to provide a postcode unique to a specific address, but I’m not clear on how thoroughly they’ve been implemented.
The southeastern Wisconsin system takes the address idea further, the address grid is tied back to the Milwaukee grid. A local official gives the example W156 N8480: roughly 156 streets west of the origin and 84 blocks north. He specifically notes that you can use the address to determine whether you need to travel north, south, east, or west. Wisconsin's statewide NG9-1-1 standards even explicitly recognize these two-direction grid addresses, giving W180N8085 as an example.
That is, in a navigational sense, superior to ordinary street addressing.
Take something like N90 W17567. Once you understand the system, you already know approximately where the destination is: the road lies about 90 blocks north of the baseline, while the property is about 175.67 blocks west of the north-south baseline. The address is essentially a human-readable coordinate pair.
In other words, if someone gives you an address like N90 W17567, and you understand the grid, you immediately know roughly how far north and west the property is without having to look up the street or pull out a map.
So every city you travel to you need to look up the baseline location? I'd rather houses and streets have numbers so I can determine how to get there just by looking at street signs.
No. You need to know your current location. Then you can easily extrapolate where the destination is.
You can figure it out close enough without looking it up.
[flagged]
When discussing systems like the sequential vs the grid, the article misses one other important type of addressing: the metric system (used in most cities of Brazil for example). In this system the number are roughly the distance (in meters) from the beginning of the street (of course following the even/odd sides rule). This results in "messier" numbers than the grid system, numbers that don't match the hundreds to the block number, but it perfectly codify distances even in the presence of blocks of different sizes on different cities or neighborhoods. Also it works perfectly without blocks at all, a long road without any crossings can follow the same pattern, and when a city grows onto new lands and new blocks are carved by the side of those roads, the same old numbers continue working unchanged (this pattern can be seen clearly when old radial roads slowly turn into radial avenues as the city grows).
† Some Addresses:
* https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
* 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5791489
* 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907301
* 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24926417
Napoleon...the answer to this is Napoleon. Also, the odd vs even number thing comes from him too. Pretty weird that the page doesn't mention him at all.
A kot of things got regularized for E911 over time in the US. In my lifetime, I remember not having a street address--only a rural delivery route. (I think a PO Box got added at one one point though we didn't actually have or use the box.) And a cabin we would rent out from time to time didn't have an address either even as an adult. There were a lot of oddities around; roads with continuous numbering schemes where you couldn't actually drive from one end of the road to another.
Unrelated, Japan (shocker) has a totally different system, at least they used to.
Japan has buildings addressed by block rather than by street (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system), which is a legacy inherited from older systems and can be a nightmare for finding places (web searches will find you plenty of complaints from native residents about the system and its issues, like a lack of any consistent ordering). I suppose it does have the advantage that streets can be changed, interrupted, etc, without affecting the expected addresses at all.
With online maps and GPS, I find it less notable these days but I remember it being a bit of a nightmare the first once or twice when I was there even though I was aware going in.
When Australia decided every address should have a number (early 60s I guess) my grandmother simply refused to comply. She continued to use the name of the house in all correspondence (including the gas company, milkman, voting, whatever) until she finally moved out of her house around 1998 when she was also in her 90s.
Fun one: Costa Rican addresses are still often relative to a landmark. I used to have a subcontractor there, and his address was something like "500m north of the old church" (which IIRC wasn't even there anymore). It was kinda hard to figure out how to get this into the DHL website, but it always made it there.
There was a study a decade or so ago, where they found Costa Rica loses around $720M annually due to productivity loses due to their address system.
https://archive.is/qvgOI
I learned about this when standing at the customs counter in San Jose at two in the morning. I had an address for an AirBnB but the address as given didn't come up in google maps, or the system used by customs. They wanted to know where we were staying, and it was a bit of a sticking point. Eventually we were able to whatsapp the host and got a different way of addressing it that worked. Quite a memorable encounter.
I remember in San José and maybe other Costa Rican cities with a street number system where even/odd were used for the cardinal directions. Calles (streets) run N/S, Avenidas (avenues) run E/W, and odd is east or north. So Calle 8 Avenida 7 is in the northwest. I also remember finding it helpful in theory but not very helpful in practice since the rest of the addressing wasn't normalized. I also recall more than one Latin American city where they ran the numbers up one-by-one, and this didn't scale over the decades or centuries, so they renumbered... just meaning that every house had two numbers, and people used both.
If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy the book _When Information Came of Age_ by Headrick. The chapters on maps and postal systems in particular have some overlap with this article.
House numbering is surprisingly interesting and diverse! Europe does it differently from the Americas, but Colombia has its own method, and so does Germany. (Infuriatingly, you can find both German and European house numbering in Berlin.) Some cities assign two numbers to a building on a street corner, one number for each street; some don't. Then again, some places like Brasília or Naberezhnye Chelny don't use streets as the "scope" for house numbers at all, and adopt numeration by neighborhood that looks like it's intended for robots not humans -- I used to go to a bar in Brasília whose address was CLS 409 bloco A. And some countries don't care for house numbers at all, like Bosnia and Herzegovina.
I have a feeling that someone has to have a special interest in all that. Hell, maybe I should write a blog post.
Here in California, we have Carmel-By-The-Sea, which has had no street addresses for more than 100 years. The town is finally implementing them after endless resistance entirely because the basically static population has finally aged out enough that people's medical supply deliveries and the like can't get to the right houses.
On a side note, boy, this page is a nightmare of low-contrast design and ads everywhere on top of that.
Another page that gets "cute" with javascript and in turn is unreadable because of it. (not technically unreadable, but waiting for the test to appear gets in the way to reading to the point where it isn't worth your time).